Catching Mice Is Not All

EVEN if his politics may not have been always unexceptionable Mao Zedong was right at least when he insisted on putting politics in command, implying the supremacy of ideology. The turmoil in China which has culminated in the mass massacre of unarmed and entirely peaceful men, women and children by the People's Army and other branches of the security forces in Beijing and some other Chinese cities has been, it will be conceded even by Mao's critics, an outcome ordained in the last analysis by the ideological void created by the pragmatic modernisation programme initiated and guided by the country's present 'maximum' leader Deng Xiaoping who declared that it did not matter whether the cat was black or white so long as it caught mice.